


Beloved

by Kass



Category: Megillat Ester | Book of Esther
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 2, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-17
Updated: 2018-02-17
Packaged: 2019-03-20 07:18:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13712670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kass/pseuds/Kass





	Beloved

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mihrsuri](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mihrsuri/gifts).



Mordechai took her to wife as soon as she had bled. Esther was fiercely glad: she didn't want to go to some other man, some stranger who might beat her. Besides, Mordechai was as beautiful as she herself. He had thick hair that had once been dark, though Esther liked the way it was shot through now with silver ash. He had a beautiful profile, a prominent nose that bespoke his other attributes, and his hands were always warm. Esther loved those hands and the way they turned her whole body into an instrument that Mordechai played with consummate skill.

She knew her time with him would be limited by the difference in their ages. Someday he would be infirm and she would care for him. She had accepted that before she ever signaled that she would welcome his advances. But she hadn't imagined that their marriage would be cut short by affairs of state.

When word got out that Vashti had been banished for insubordination and that Achashverosh summoned every beautiful woman in Persia to the palace to be paraded before him, Esther knew that her days with her beloved were numbered. She knew that once the king saw her, he would demand her for his harem. Mordechai knew it too.

She took on a stricter veiling practice than modesty actually required, and made a habit of keeping her eyes down when walking to and from the market. Every time she had to go out, she was tense and anxious. When she made it home again, still safe from the king's men, she shed her veils and slumped against the inside of the door in silent gratitude.

In this way she hid from the king's messengers for four years, but she and Mordechai both knew she couldn't hide forever. When the king's men spotted her behind her veils, they demanded that she bare her face, and then they ordered her to come to the palace. She would not have survived saying no. It wasn't really a choice. She didn't mention that she was married: they would only have killed her husband, and that was the most unbearable notion imaginable.

Mordechai too went to the capital city. He took a room near the palace gates, and every day he walked outside the carved stone walls of the harem courtyard and recited verses aloud. The other women in the harem swooned at his voice, low and measured, smoky and sultry in the ear. Everyone knew that he had something to do with her -- he started his daily poetry recitations outside the courtyard the day after she arrived in the harem -- but no one said a word.

At night, when the others were asleep, she returned to the courtyard and pressed her fingertips through the ornate stone grate. They did not speak: it was too dangerous, and too painful. Long after she returned to her pallet, she imagined that she still felt the warmth of his fingers against hers.

 

_There's a Babylonian tradition that says that Mordechai took Esther to wife. (See[Esther: Midrash and Aggadah](https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/esther-midrash-and-aggadah) at the Jewish Women's Archive for citations.)_


End file.
